Senate passes two bills aimed at alleviating veteran unemployment

The two bills that the Senate passed yesterday, the Returning Heroes and Wounded Warrior Tax Credits, will give businesses up to $9,600 back for hiring veterans who are out of work or who have service-related disabilities. That's on top of new career resources that the President announced this week to support the more than 850,000 unemployed veterans living here at home, and more than a million more returning from Iraq and Afghanistan in the next few months and years.

Similar to President Obama's announcement that all service women and men will return from Iraq before the holidays, the two bills mentioned above intend to help ease the burden on military members and their families. The Obama administration and the Senate is trying to make ground on the exodus of military members returning home to find a country in turmoil without the political will to make substantial ground.

What we can use in this dispatch is the White House's admission that there are 850,000 (a conservative number) unemployed veterans. Of those veterans many are struggling through traumatic experiences from their service. As veterans and allies, we need to keep pressure on our elected officials to not only increase the treatment, but rethink the diagnosis but addressing the systemic problems engrained into the foundation of the armed services and foreign policy.